The name of this series, The Struggle to Right Oneself, hits me deep in my chest.

“Beyond the basic laws that govern and maintain our equilibrium, we live in a world that constantly tests our stability in various other forms.”
- Kerry Skarbakka

This particular image has more of a feeling of intentionality than the others, which to me, indicates more of the choice that we have in how we respond to the tests we encounter.

via Colossal

via Fuel Your Creativity

by Alex Stoddard

This is amazing. It strikes and makes you feel. What it makes you feel exactly is up for grabs, but the point it, it MOVES!

More (and new gorgeousness) every day here at his Flickr!

by Zhang Jingna

via Alice at My Modern Metropolis

Capture on film at high speed.

And get this splendid image.

I love how the shape of the water within the now-defunct balloon is preserved, even though the container has been reduced to a few splotches of material.

By Lex Augusteijn. (More images on his site)

via Eugene at MyModernMet

These are firefly trails! Photographed by a German guy named Kristian Cvecek.

And guess what? He’s a physicist. Aww yeah. Science and art, thank you very much.

via Alice at MyModernMet
read more at DailyMail

by Jasper James

It bugs me in a way that their heads are lopped off. (I’d rather it be cropped at the waist.) But the fact that it bugs me is why I stopped to look and stopped to post. Ads work when they catch your eye and don’t let you leave. Plus I’m always a sucker for frozen motion and swishy skirts.

]]> https://fernlim.com/bits/314/leap/feed/ 0 https://fernlim.com/bits/325/an-iphone-creation-sunset-timelapse/ https://fernlim.com/bits/325/an-iphone-creation-sunset-timelapse/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:02:10 +0000 Fern http://fernlim.com/bits/?p=325

iphone timelapse of St Petersburg Florida sunset from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

This guy made a timelapse video of a gorgeous sunset entirely on his iPhone!

What struck me most was the contrast of the slowly morphing clouds versus the frenzy of the frantic humans.

A commenter noted that “the seagulls create a sort of ‘old film filter’ effect” which I find to be a thoroughly spiffy observation.

iphone timelapse of sunset (Vimeo)
via Cameron Moll

“The installation is based on an idea for a dance performance in which the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between the pillars,” explains For Use’s Christoph Katzler. “The dancers are stretching the tape while they move, so the resulting shape is a recording of the choreography.”

Nearly 117,000 feet and 100 pounds of tape…

…make a gargantuan spiderweb “like a giant artistic bounce house/jungle gym for adults, who can crawl inside and lounge around”.

I want to play!

shared by my sister via WebUrbanist from Fast Company (Visit for more pictures and a time lapse video of the installation’s construction.)

In response to blogotomy’s post on Perception:

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.
…
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.
…
How many other things are we missing?

I just saw Joshua Bell a few weeks ago at the Copley Symphony Hall, i.e, a setting where people were fully primed to appreciate his genius (the cost of the ticket, the stage, the lights, the audience turned by their seats to focus fully on him). He received many standing ovations.

We miss a lot of beauty because we’re constantly in a hurry and too focused on tasks to be done and destinations to be reached.

But I also think it has to do with what kind of beauty we’re more naturally attuned too or more able to appreciate. I tend to stop to watch and listen whenever someone is playing percussion or a stringed instrument because those sounds resonate with me most.

I had an engineering professor who showed our class this music video done by a large group of students to I Got A Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas. What did he tell us to pay attention to?

The beauty of motion.

He wanted us to watch the talent of the camera person in shooting this entire 5-minute, constantly moving video, in one single shot. I would have never seen this on my own. But he was so captivated by “the beauty of motion” not just in this video, but throughout the entire dynamics class that it made me want to see dynamics in the light of beauty rather than just in boring formulas. It made me want to stay in the class even when I realized it wasn’t quite the direction I wanted to go in.

So it’s not just tuning ourselves to be see beauty on our own terms, even though we frequently lack this. It’s also being receptive to what other people find beautiful and learning to expand ourselves by seeing through their eyes.